I had fun this week playing with the GQ’s UK edition iPad app. With its slick interface, rich additional materials and engaging content - it was not only superior to its US counterpart, but also one of the better iPad magazines I’ve seen. That said, something was still missing. And, as is often the case - it was missing from my mind. One of the most interesting theories on mental states is ‘flow’ - proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. The theory is deceptively simple - during certain activities it is possible to be so happily immersed in your task that you reach a point when action and awareness seem to merge. Musicians, racing car drivers and Buddhist monks have all experienced it. And normally, while reading the print edition of GQ in a cool cafe with a strong expresso - I can also get pretty close. But alas, not so much on my iPad. Somewhere in all that exploring, poking, rotating, and sliding of screen elements - while admirably interactive - the experience of media flow is disrupted.

Please don’t take this as a simple preference of analogue versus digital mediums. I can lose myself in a Kindle book, or while typing in a flow orientated interface like the IA Writer. The problem is more subtle. Years ago, when the first CD-ROMs made multimedia sexy, we envisioned a day when all of our entertainment content would become non-linear, multi-path adventures. It didn’t take long to discover that there is a reason that the likes of Stephen Spielberg and Ridley Scott are famous directors - they do a better job of selecting scenes and narrative options than the average Joe. Interactivity, quite simply, can get in the way of a good story. Or, it would seem, also a little glossy magazine gratification.

Networks have power. Politicians, mafia dons, matchmakers, Freemasons and photocopier salespeople all have something in common - their ability to nurture and exploit those invisible social ties that bind us. Whether it be trading favours or swapping information, the network has always been the most subtle and powerful weapon for those astute enough to use it. So there is something deeply perverse that in the moment that online networks offer such dazzling new opportunities to connect, that we have found ways to punish people for it.

And there is a deeper irony. Even as HR and IT departments crack down on their in-house digital dissidents, marketing teams are doing their best to curry favour with the socially networked. This holiday season numerous large retail brands partnered with 'haul video' kids, whose YouTube shopping confessionals have become rallies for pampered tweens. Elsewhere, fanboy bloggers are courted aggressively by consumer electronics firms, amateur Twitter celebrities leverage their influence for social media consulting dollars, and surgically enhanced netstars trade their geek fame credentials for commercial endorsements and b-grade Hollywood roles. For now, at least, it looks like a motley parade. But the underlying trend is worth considering.

What if you could assess someone's online social standing and influence as easily as checking a credit score? Eventually employers will have access to highly sophisticated systems that will allow them to do just that. When that happens - instead of being castigated for their blogs, tweets and friend lists - job applicants will experience the opposite. The best hires will be the ones that bring their networks to the table. 

Limited social analysis software is already in the market. There are already some interesting applications like Twitter Grader, Twitalyzer, TweetLevel and Klout that use algorithymic voodoo to estimate your Twitter authority. When I tested my own handle, I was given a wide variety of different scores and curious facts which did not mean very much to me, other than it was fun to discover that I joined Twitter on the same day as eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar. More comprehensive analytical platforms are needed, with some targeted smarts that look at the relevance of networks for particular industries or goals. Sheer brute connections are not enough. Its better to have just 100 people in your network, rather than a million - if they are the right 100. 

I know what you are thinking. There is something sickening about all of this - the rabbit like multiplication of networks and connections. Surely it should be enough to be good at what you do, without having to also ape the online promiscuity of Kim Kardashian and Ashton Kutcher. But in the future, who you know will also be what you know. And to misappropriate Yeats - the best lack conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

I was quoted in a magazine article on the office of the future, appearing in the December 2010 edition of Virgin's inflight magazine, Voyeur. In the piece I discuss the rise of 'immersion rooms' capable of modular virtual stacking, equipped with pressure mats, motion sensors and full screen wall projections.

After a long hiatus of not wearing a watch at all, I recently took possession of my dream piece - an IWC Perpetual Calendar. Intricate, complicated, and ironically - unrepentantly analogue. But the mystery deepened. As I opened the box containing the watch I discovered a small glass vial, sealed by wax and containing a tiny, perfectly machined part. 'You, or should I say - your great great descendant will need this on January 1, 2200', said the brand manager in response to my puzzled expression - 'it is the replacement slide for when the calendar year moves into a new century'. That set me thinking. We always assume that digital is the logical evolution of analogue, but could it be a relationship more subtle?

First, a confession. I love analogue. I take pictures on an old film Leica, I write with a leaky fountain pen on a small Moleskine notebook and I aspire owning my favourite albums on vinyl and a real valve driven hi-fi. Part of the motivation for my retrograde lusts are aesthetic. I like the look of film grain, the feel of paper, and the warm sound of records. But there are also powerful emotions attached to the idea that things can still be crafted.

A real part of the appeal of ‘steam punk’, where the high tech is re-imagined as a mechanised baroque fantasy of cogs and flywheels - is that we regain the feeling that technology is not magic but the results of human engineering. Like the Eloi, as our hardware has advanced, we lost our knowledge of its workings. Modern electronics can no longer be fixed, merely discard and replaced. Worst of all - the lack of permanence in the things that surround us is mirrored in the constant stream of social media and status updates. In other words, momentum gets routinely mistaken for meaning.

I think that is why Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem is so seductive. Imagine a world strictly divided between a technological and commercial saecular society and a group known as the Avout, intellectuals who live monastically in cloistered communities. The Avout are forbidden to communicate with people outside the walls of their monastry except during certain periods in which giant gates open - like clockwork - every year/decade/century/millenium, depending their vows. It is like a societal coping mechanism to prevent the loss of knowledge through progress.

You can easily lose perspective in the perpetual present. Think about your world. User generated content is already on the way out. Few create, most consume. Blogging is a dying art. Eventually, we won't even tweet. Our devices will simply automatically check us in, and signal silently to each other - until we ourselves resemble human sized packets in a distributed network.

I doubt that my little glass vial will survive into the hands of a great, great grandchild, but in a way that’s not really the point. Its just nice to be reminded that while the chaotic universe might not operate like Isacc Newton’s perfect celestial clock - through our devices and desires, we still have the capacity to create small moments of perpetuity.

You don't want to know what I paid for my iPad. Call it waiting list frustration, irrational fanboy exuberance or just plain stupidity - but it got the point when I convinced myself that no self respecting futurist should be without a MessiahPad. Now that I've had a few months to contemplate the depths of my Apple avarice, let me offer a few thoughts on what Steve's new toy might mean for news, books, authors and publishing at large.

Firstly, a confession. I've fallen in love with newspapers again. The digital revolution was not kind to the world of print. After tearing its money making heart out (classifieds, subscription revenues and finally, display advertising), it disaggregated whatever content was left, and placed it at the mercy of a search algorithm. But fire up the Financial Times or the New York Times apps on the iPad, and there is no doubt that the newspaper is back - in aesthetics, if not quite yet in financial vigour.

Still, these are early days and upon closer inspection it is clear that tablet applications reflect imaginations trapped by metaphor. The FT app looks beautiful, but just try selecting text, sharing articles on social media or performing the digital equivalent of tearing out a page to keep. My workaround is saving screenshots, but that is far from an elegant solution. On the flip side, RSS readers like Pulse and Reeder excel at making my thousands of feed subscriptions intelligible and infinitely share-able. But lets face it, RSS is still the lingua franca of geekdom not the newsprint reading masses.

As for books, I'm also a tablet convert and as much as I hate to say it - Amazon's Kindle is far better in emulation. Last year's personal zeitgeist moment was when I decided to move seventeen packing boxes of books out of my house into storage. Yes the smell and touch of books is wonderful, but the weight of them in my travel bag is not. I thought that was the end of it, but this year I've added my Kindle to my paperback mass grave. As it turns out, all the things that made Kindle great, are even greater on iPad - highlighting, high speed scanning of books and the presentation of your library.

Well, almost everything. Seriously Jeff, where the hell is the search button? Does its presence violate some antiquated book licensing agreement? And why can't I select text in a book and share it on my blog? In fact, why can't I share what I'm reading with the people in my social network? Apple's iBook store is not much better. OK, so Apple has scripted some neat animations of page turns and books sliding onto virtual shelves - but is this any different from the early e-commerce websites in the nineties that had corny animations of shopping carts and supermarket aisles? Be not deceived!

You see, the real reason why the iPad is not the future of publishing is that re-inventing the art of reading has nothing to do with technology. To make real progress, we need escape velocity from the limitations of the metaphors that bind us. You can have the world's most innovative device, but unless we rethink our business and content models - we are doomed to merely port our limitations onto new, shinier screens. Everyone was amazed at the Alice in Wonderland ebook - and for good reason. It was more than just a book on a tablet - it was an entirely new form of content that tapped into the inherent strengths of a new medium. But how many other brilliantly interactive publications have you seen like that since the launch of the iPad? Almost none. Even the second issue of Wired was a let down.

All of this poses publishers with an interesting conundrum. Making books, marketing books and distributing books has, for as long as there have been printing presses, been a tough job. That's why us authors largely don't self publish. But if publishing in the future means selling and marketing an application in the App Store, how well are today's publishers placed to achieve that task? And if others are better suited to that job, how will the new economics of royalties and commission splits reflect the reality of tomorrow's reading market?

As I write my next book, all of these thoughts are bouncing around on the trampoline of my mind. In a way, my first book Futuretainment was an analogue work designed for tablet world. Not a Kindle mind you, but certainly a device capable of giving life to the interplay of images, words and motion. We are in the midst of a publishing shift that should excite content creators with its potential. In some ways, creating a book in the future will be closer to producing a movie or a video game. You will need a team handling visual production, application development, mobile distribution, and social awareness. The simple days of a writer, an editor and a royalty contract are almost at an end.

But some things will also stay the same. The book, as a conceptual archetype will persist, as did the music album even in an age of digital singularity. Books are more than just analogue containers of related paragraphs - they represent a totality that collectively stands for something more. In a way, without them, we would have nothing to blog about.